Being someone who setup my own web-design company you see a lot of things change and at a rapid speed too. I’m talking here about how you design websites. You must never overlook the importance of mobile in web design
If you go back ten years we didn’t have mobile websites. We barely had mobile. People were learning what phones could do and then came the iPhone and things just blew up. After apple released the iPhone other companies soon followed introducing their own touch screen phones, tried to replicate the app store and gave everyone access to the Internet 24/7. Be honest, who checks their phone before they even get out of bed in the morning? I know the first thing I do is catch up on Twitter because god forbid I missed out on what a friend of mine in New York was having for dinner. The point I am making here is that mobile has just gone crazy. It’s bigger than ever and is only going to grow further.
I started making websites about four or five years ago and I never made them for mobile. Not as many people were using mobile, but I knew it was coming. Then in March of 2012 I setup my own web-design company and I was correct. People wanted mobile. They rarely checked websites online anymore. The only one they really checked were their social networks and there were apps for that, so it was becoming a thing they did once every two days rather than once a day. We all slowly shifted on mobile and don’t get me wrong, we still are moving over, but before we know it big desktops will be a thing of the past.
Credit: http://www.goegi.org
Facebook, the biggest website in the world right now, is close on 500 million mobile users. Most of their traffic comes from mobile now and very few actually use the desktop version. There is a reason they spent a lot of money developing their mobile site. For any website to be considered ‘good’ nowadays it has to be able to transfer onto tablet and mobile. I know 70% of traffic to dylanvarian.com is all mobile and 53% of that is from android devices – proving apple is not the only one here.
The moral of the story here is that mobile is the future and if your business doesn’t have a website, you will fail. But more importantly, if your business has a website but not mobile – GET IT NOW. I for one check a restaurants website before I eat there and where do I check it? Yes, on my phone. I also check their twitter and if they’re not active on twitter I may not even go there. Their online presence is a lot to me, it says a lot about a business and if you’re not willing to stick with the times then I am not willing to stick with you. It’s a very small investment, for something great in return.
Get mobile. Get online.